Humbert's main defensive argument is that he suffers from psychological pedophilia as a result of losing his childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh, to typhus and not that he is a terrible person. Humbert says that her death made it impossible to love again. "I also know that the shock on Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance" (Nabakov 14; bk. 1, ch. 4). That changes when he meets Lolita. Humbert goes on to convince the reader that he falls for Lolita as a replacement for the loss of his innocent childhood love on the beach which damaged his psyche so severely. "I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel" (Nabakov 14; bk. 1, ch. 4). Humbert uses rhetoric to compare himself to the famous, beloved, poet Edgar Allen Poe. Humbert calls himself Poe, and the name of his first, deceased, lover Annabel Leigh is taken, almost plagiarizingly, from the poem Annabel Lee by Poe. In the critical analysis Who Really Was Annabel Leigh the author states, "Annabel Leigh is part of the rhetorical devices used by the narrator to exculpate himself. In a way, she functions pretty much as do Laura and Beatrice mentioned as examples of desirable teenagers loved by poets (and H.H. is sure he is an artist like them)" (Thomieres 165). This allusion to Poe is supposed to somewhat endear the reader towards Humbert Humbert and show that for a great artist like himself to love a child is normal. Ellen Pifer also recognizes this is her literary criticism Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook. "Lolita contains numerous parodic allusions to other literary works, especially to Merimee's Carmen and Poe's 'Annabelle Lee'" (40). The narrator also gives examples of times and places where the love of a so-called girl child was acceptable moral behavior in a society.
